By now, it’s become old news to say video is critical for businesses to attract and retain consumers online. In fact, producing video content has become table stakes for businesses in most industries. A 2015 study of online and social video marketing showed that 56 percent of consumers expect businesses that have a website to also have video content available online.
But while it’s easy enough to pick up an iPhone and film product demos or produce customer testimonials, not all videos have to (or should) be focused on selling.
Branded videos shift the attention away from goods or services with a price tag on them and instead shine a spotlight on the company, employees, values, and practices that bring those goods to life in the first place. Study after study has shown how important brand loyalty, especially among tech-savvy younger generations, can be for businesses. One of the best ways to build this loyalty is by allowing your customers to feel like they really understand your brand at an intimate and personal level, and branded videos can be some of the best tools to enable this connection.
As your business embarks on a branded video strategy, these are three key components to keep in mind.
1. Focus on emotion
Defining an audience should always be one of the first steps in any marketing campaign, and it’s especially critical when creating branded video. The audience you create for will guide everything about your video, from its tone to the platforms it’s shared on.
A branded video geared towards generating new user awareness has the unique opportunity to develop a distinct emotion in an audience before tying that emotion to a brand name. One of the best recent examples of this was Android’s Friends Furever video, the first 58 seconds of which features a variety of awe-inspiring and adorable four-legged stars, with nary an Android device in sight. Only at the very end does Android’s logo appear, leaving googly-eyed viewers (nearly 25 million of them to date) associating warm fuzzy feelings with Android’s name.
For campaigns aimed at driving existing customer engagement, brands can work to remind the audience of what they’ve always loved about the brand, or take the opportunity to mold a new perception.
On-demand taxi service Lyft needed to reinvigorate its brand with a sense of fun and spontaneity to remind current and past riders why they should choose Lyft over other big-name rivals. To achieve this, the brand launched a series of Undercover Lyft videos showing Lyft riders around the country being surprised with celebrity drivers. The videos don’t directly encourage viewers to continue using the service, and they don’t even include a URL to download the app for new users. But watching unsuspecting commuters discover that they’re being chauffeured around by Shaquille O’Neal is enough to make customers keep using the service in hopes of their own A-list ride. The ongoing series of videos has generated more than 16 million views on YouTube.
2. Think cross-channel
The channel on which a branded video is launched can affect its impact almost as much as the creative work itself. In the midst of a heated political season, car maker Audi seized an opportunity to get its brand in the spotlight. The Audi ad titled “Duel” debuted during the first presidential debate, showing an Audi vehicle for less than five seconds at the end of the 1:30 long video. What occupies the remainder of the video is a reverse-chronological portrayal of two valet parking attendants fighting over the car, playing up the knock-down, drag-out atmosphere of the debate night to come. The ad, which aired again during successive debate nights, focused entirely on generating brand impressions — not on promoting partisan rhetoric. This campaign was a nearly perfect integration of channel, context, and creative, with each element working to maximize the potential of the piece.
While long-format, high-production brand videos work well against a presidential backdrop, other channels and settings require very different formats. The online financial institution SoFi has leveraged Instagram ads to drive new user awareness. Short, 15-second ad formats might seem restrictive for brands looking to tell a deep story, but for SoFi, 15 seconds was more than enough time to effectively juxtapose its brand against the big banks at the helm of the 2008 financial crisis. One video in particular, a silent film showing the interior of an abandoned bank, helped to create a 15 percent increase in brand awareness for SoFi over the course of the campaign.
3. Envision what success looks like
At the end of every marketing campaign, there’s the inevitable question: Was it successful?
For typical video or content initiatives, it is easy enough to look at sales and revenue generated from clicks to judge performance. But when you’re working with a brand video, success metrics can be a little more hazy. At the outset of a brand campaign, it’s ideal to start thinking about what success with your video will look like. Success could simply be measured by impressions of the video within a target audience, or it could go further to target deeper engagement.
Looking to increase their appeal with millennials, food company Knorr created a three-minute video titled “Knorr #LoveAtFirstTaste” and showed what would happen on blind dates between people with shared flavor preferences. The endearing video was played more than 60 million times, but the campaign success didn’t stop there. Nearly two million people proceeded to complete the Knorr Flavor Profiler online as well, further engaging with this savory brand campaign.
In another example of brand videos generating more than just views, the Always #LikeaGirl video has almost singlehandedly changed the way women talk about and interact with the feminine hygiene product brand online. This particular video aims to inspire a discussion about what it means to be a girl. Seemingly overnight, Always (and menstruation) went from being taboo to talk about online, to a badge of honor for women promoting female empowerment. The video has gotten more than 60 million views on YouTube, but arguably the bigger success of this video is the wave of organic social sharing that it prompted. More than a million people shared the video on social media channels, further expanding the campaign’s reach and impact.
Solidifying the audience, channel, and success metrics of your brand video early in the planning process will ensure that decisions made during filming and launch all contribute to the same end goal. But for some brands just getting started with video, creating a brand video from scratch can still be an overwhelming endeavor. Shutterstock Premier’s Footage Collection removes the pressure of starting with a blank screen and can bring your brand’s story to life in vivid HD and 4K video. Or, if you just need to put finishing touches on a video you’ve already created, find a soundtrack that can really help your brand sing.
